Subscription retention
Keeping the customers you worked so hard to acquire drives sustainable app growth. The Subscription Retention report shows you exactly how well you’re maintaining your subscriber base over time, helping you spot both wins and potential issues before they impact your bottom line.
What makes this report different
While churn metrics tell you who’s leaving, retention puts the focus on who’s staying - giving you a clearer picture of your app’s stickiness and the long-term health of your customer relationships. By tracking retention alongside trends, you can separate normal fluctuations from real retention challenges that need attention.
Report components
The retention visualization
The main chart shows how your retention rate changes over time through two key elements:
A purple filled area representing your actual retention rate - showing the percentage of subscribers who stay with your app
A dotted trend line revealing the longer-term direction of your retention - helping you distinguish between daily variations and meaningful patterns
This dual visualization helps you spot both immediate changes that might need investigation and gradual trends that could signal broader opportunities or challenges.
Understanding your numbers
Retention calculations
The report offers two ways to look at retention, each telling you something valuable about your subscriber base:
Retention Rate: The pure percentage of subscribers who stayed with your app - your baseline measure of customer stability
Net Retention Rate: Factors in both departures and returns, showing retention after accounting for reactivated subscriptions
Configuration options
Fine-tune your retention analysis with precise controls:
Shop Status: Choose whether to include or exclude frozen and unfrozen shops, helping you separate temporary Shopify account deactivations from true retention patterns
Time Period: Analyze retention across different timeframes to spot seasonal patterns or measure the impact of retention initiatives
Segments: Break down retention by customer type, plan level, or other key attributes to understand what drives stronger retention